By default, if a context button is added to the ContextButtons collection of the owner control, it is automatically displayed when an end-user hovers over the owner control with the mouse cursor. You can override this behavior and specify that a particular context button is always visible or hidden using the Visibility property. Also, the context button can be displayed in the enabled or disabled state. The disabled button is displayed in a light hue and does not respond to end-user interaction. To specify whether a button is enabled or disabled, use the Enabled property.

The AppearanceNormal and AppearanceHover properties allow you to customize the button appearance in the normal and hovered states, respectively. The glyphs displayed by the context button in these states can be specified by the Glyph and HoverGlyph properties. For the RatingContextButton objects, these properties specify the grading scale point glyphs in the corresponding states.

The Alignment property allows you to align the context button relative to the owner control. Note that the alignment affects the orientation of the button — it can be oriented vertically or horizontally. If the alignment relative to the owner control does not meet your needs, you can align the context button relative to another button — anchor element (see AnchorAlignment).

The owner control exposes the ContextButtonClick event that fires when a context button is clicked. This event allows you to respond to clicks on context buttons in a centralized way. You can also handle the Click event to respond to a click on a particular button.

Also, the owner control exposes the ContextButtonOptions property that provides access to the settings applied to the context buttons displayed in the control, and the panels containing these buttons. Using this property you can specify the following settings:

back color of each panel (top, bottom, etc.) that contains the context buttons, and the amount of empty space around the buttons;

animation type used to show the panels and the animation duration time;

glyph skinning feature for all context buttons. This setting can be overridden for a particular button using the AllowGlyphSkinning property;